Prologue

They say blood will let. It is true. As such, my children, each of them, are as cursed as I, their mother. They are destined to be lovers of vice. Sinners. Slaves to lust.

~The Duchess of A

London, England

A t eleven years of age, Lady Raina Goodheart was entirely too old to believe in ghosts. That did not , however, prevent her from fearing them.

Lying alone in her chambers, with her nursemaid, dead to the world, snoring away in the connecting room, Raina stared at the floral canopy overhead.

She swallowed loudly.

Dead to the world hadn't been the best thought.

Her only brother, Gregory, the future Duke of Argyll had assured Raina spirits returning from the dead, weren't real. And if they were , those haunts would have far grander, more enjoyable things to do upon their return to earth than go about bothering young girls attempting to sleep.

Having gone off to university, Gregory didn't come 'round as he used to.

Alone, in her rooms, with only the night's shadows and a recurring forlorn wail for company, Raina wasn't altogether sure, her wise, powerful, confident, older brother had the right of it.

Another distant, broken sob, whispered in the midnight silence.

Raina snatched her chintz coverlet and tugged it up to her chin.

They aren't real, Raina. They aren't real.

In a bid to escape the pervading terror, Raina did what Gregory told her to do if he weren't around; repeat in her mind, their conversation about spirits.

" Whyever would a spirit spend a night here when he could be up to all manner of mischief at some wicked masquerade? " Gregory's gently spoken reminder echoed.

She focused on breathing—just like he'd said. "They wouldn't." She'd answered him. "Whyever would ghosts wish to spend the evening at the Goodheart residence?"

"Precisely," he'd reassured.

A long, forlorn moan broke once more into the quiet.

Raina squeezed her eyes shut.

If they weren't real, then what else could possibly account for those piteous wails that came and went on various nights?

"There are no monsters," she whispered to herself. "There are no ghosts."

Another piercing sob spilled into the quiet.

Before her courage deserted her, Raina swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood.

The cold came up to meet her bare feet. Shivering, Raina first fetched her wrapper, then a candlestick, and made her way from the room.

With the way Mrs. Bossley drank her gin before bed and then slept, the older woman wouldn't have heard a mail coach were it to come crashing through her lone window.

As if to highlight that very point, the moment Raina brought the door shut behind her, an enormous, bleating snore spilled through the white-painted panel.

Alone in the long, empty, corridor, she looked around.

The lit tapers within the gilded sconces dripped beads of clear wax like sorrowful teardrops. Dark shadows flickered off the peacock-painted wallpaper, turning those sapphire and emerald majestic birds into sinister beasts.

Raina's hand trembled violently, and the abrupt movement sent the tiny flame out so that the only light remaining came from within the handful of sconces still lit.

As she inched deeper down the hall, she took care to keep her gaze directed forward.

How had she failed to appreciate before now, how unnaturally quiet it was in the dead of night. Or how eerie the halls?

Perhaps they always had been?

Raina attempted to swallow around the large knot in her throat.

"Gr-Gregory," she spoke into the quiet. "I know you said there are no such things as ghosts and monsters, and I believe you because you never lie to me, so I'm hoping it is just you and Rex and Edward who are here and just being noisy." She paused to take a deep breath. " Is it you?"

He always did return the most unexpected of times and made the grandest show when he arrived.

Raina went still.

Wait . At some point, the wretched cries, stopped .

If she'd even heard them, at all.

Raina glanced about the empty corridor.

"It appears you were right, Gregory," she grudgingly—but all too happily to be wrong, this time—admitted. "I possess a colorful imagination and hate sleep because I don't want to miss anything. That's what you always say, isn't it?"

She didn't need a reply, his already existed in her head.

A duke's daughter lived a lonely life. The servants did not permit their children to play with Raina. The village children did, but only for those short times her family retired in the summer. As such, Raina took the one friend whom she did have in her brother and relied on him, even when he wasn't around.

He—

A ragged sob punctured the quiet.

With a gasp, Raina bolted. She took off running for her rooms and didn't stop until she reached them.

When from the distance, Raina picked up a single word being uttered over and over.

"Why-wh— whyyyy ?"

Monsters and ghosts didn't speak the King's English.

Did they?

Raina's heart continued to pound.

Wait ! Raina recognized the hoarse, lyrical, voice.

" Mother ," she whispered.

The duchess's sobs answered in return.

Frantic, Raina looked about. Papa ! She must fetch Papa but she didn't want to go off alone in the dark to find him.

Raina chewed at her lower lip; when some twenty paces ahead, a tall, graceful figure, emerged from the shadows. Mother dressed in flowy white silk skirts, so sheer as to be see-through, glided like some wispy specter.

She blinked. "Mother?" she repeated, this time more loudly.

The duchess trailed the halls, giving no outward indication she'd heard Raina. Mother and daughter existed in some strange plain; like they were trapped in a dream but separated by a screen.

Raina frowned; her fear forgotten.

Where was she going ?

With her gaze, she followed her mother's meandering path, until the duchess reached the South wing.

Springing to life, Raina sprinted after her. Winded and out of breath, she stumbled around the corner.

They continued on that way.

The duchess wandering. Raina following. Until at last, Raina's chase brought her to a wing of the house she'd never been.

Strange that. She lived in this household, played in its every corner, and there were still uncharted parts to explore.

With sagging shoulders, Mother let herself inside one of these foreign rooms.

Click.

Raina's wonderment vanished and her unease returned. She tiptoed cautiously, then stopped at Mother's door.

Dampening her mouth, Raina pressed an ear against the panel.

Faintly, Raina made out the muffled, sounds of more crying. Mother, who never wept and always wore a smile.

Raina yearned to go right back to her chambers and forget everything she'd seen and heard. But she couldn't. Mother had wiped Raina's tears countless times, now Raina needed to be there for her .

Bringing her shoulders back, Raina let herself in. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darker setting. When they did, she moved her gaze around the pretty bedchambers.

"Mother?" she called quietly, as she walked slowly throughout.

There was no answer.

Then she found her.

She lay beside an ink pot, turned over on its side. The small pool of black continued to leak out toward an empty crystal decanter.

Raina's frown deepened. She knew what an empty bottle meant. The last time she'd discovered one, she'd also found Gregory and Edward raucously inebriated and outrageously loud.

But the duchess wasn't loud .

"Mother," Raina whispered.

It was her mother, but at the same time, it wasn't.

Curled on her side against the corner.

Raina fell to a knee and touched her lightly on the shoulder. "Mama?" she repeated.

Weeping softly, the duchess rolled onto her back.

Raina started at the sight of her: her glazed, vacant, eyes bloodshot and swollen as they'd never been. Her lips covered in rouge.

"I hate h-her," the duchess slurred, "b-but I hate him more." A gurgling half-laugh, half-sob escaped her. "But I l-love him even more than I hate him."

Her pulse picked up again. "Wh-who, Mother?" Fear burgeoned in her belly.

The duchess lifted her tear-ravaged face. She moved a drunken gaze over Raina's. "Why can't I be enough?"

"I don't know what you mean, Mama," she implored. "You are enough."

Father. Where is Father?

Raina desperately longed to search for him. He always made Mother smile.

"I-I hate all of them," her mother's words rolled together so badly, Raina struggled to make out what she was saying.

When she did, a chill went through Raina. "Wh-Who do you hate?"

But Raina's voice didn't seem to penetrate the faraway misery and hate in the duchess's eyes. "She is for us. They are for us," she spat. "It's never for us. It's for him." Another crazed laugh burst from her lips. "And I do it for him but then…I love it, because I'm just as d-depraved."

Raina's teeth clanked together. I don't understand.

Did she even voice her question aloud? Maybe not, because she didn't want to understand whatever it was Mama spoke about.

Suddenly, through whatever hell kept the duchess in its snare loosened. Lucidity glimmered in her tear-filled eyes. "We are a family of sinners, Raina. Your father. His father before him. The entire line is corrupted to the core. Me." Her features twisted. " Gregory . My beautiful boy is n-no different than him."

The duchess's shoulders slumped. "I-It is in our blood, Raina," her mother said, her voice steady and sober and all the more chilling for it. "You'll see."

"What is?" Raina urged, her fear redoubling. She gave the duchess a slight shake. "What is, Mama?" she repeated.

"It is in our blood, Raina. We were cursed…to be sinners. Or blessed to be sinners…"

With unsteady movements, her mother collapsed upon her back on the floor.

She's dead.

Raina cried out. Tears ravaged her cheeks the same way they did Mama's.

Except, the duchess fumbled her arm about, and then muttering something, she fetched a small book from the floor. "Here," she slurred, tossing the leather tome.

Raina caught it against her chest. Confused, she fanned through the pages. Upon inspection, it wasn't a book, but rather, a journal, kept in her mother's hand—a diary.

" I protest the wicked acts he proposes we take part in, but shamefully, wickedly, and secretly, I am intrigued and…aroused. I—" Raina's eyes widened as she read the remainder of the sinful words her mother recorded. She slapped the book shut.

"Here," she said, gruffly, and attempted to hand it back to her drowsy mother.

The duchess gave Raina a sad smile and rejected those attempts. "Better you know now than when you are a hopeful young woman with stars in your eyes, my dearest Raina."

Her eyes slipped shut. A moment later, a snore to rival Papa's favorite hunting dog, aptly named, Thunder, filled the room.

Falling back on her haunches, Raina stared at the stranger before her. Without taking her gaze from her mother's slumbering form, she grabbed a blanket off the bed. Raina looked at the cool fabric in her hands.

The crimson red satin wouldn't keep any person warm. Still, she gently covered the duchess. Raina rested her back against the bed and stayed with her mother while she slept.

The diary her mother had pushed into her hands stared tauntingly back—the book dared her to pick it up. To read.

Raina bit the inside of her lower lip hard enough to draw blood.

Then, squeezing her eyes tightly shut, she grabbed the private diary as she'd been urged to do.

Raina read.

And read.

And continued reading until a coldness lived within her and she'd reached the last page.

Heart pounding, Raina slammed the leather volume shut and tossed it on the other side of the duchess's still sleeping form.

She stared at her prone mother, a veritable stranger, who'd revealed the past Raina hadn't known, and prophesied Raina's future. Nauseous, Raina got to her feet and backed away.

She continued retreating until she'd put that hated room and her mother behind her.

But not the thoughts. Those horrid, hideous things she'd read, followed Raina, as she wound her way back through the maze of a household.

When she reached the corridor connecting to her hall, Raina stopped.

Why did I go seek out the source of those wails? Why ?

Because then, she wouldn't know. Then, she wouldn't know that her parents' love wasn't the grand, devoted one she'd believed, or that wickedness ran in the veins of all Goodheart's—Raina, included.

A large hand settled on Raina's shoulder.

Crying out, she spun to face—

"Gregory," she whispered.

"Hey, what is my favorite sister doing—" The usual cheer-filled grin on her brother's face faded. His gaze moved from Raina's swollen and bloodshot eyes to her tear-stained streaks.

"Who do I have to kill?" he asked quietly, with a lethality she'd never before heard from him.

Raina scrubbed a hand over her face. "N-No one." She gave her head an uneven shake.

He narrowed his eyes.

And through the haze of her misery, she noted details which she likely wouldn't have otherwise noted—until her meeting with their mother.

Her brother's rumpled garments. The rouge stain on his also wrinkled white cravat. The stench of spirits on his breath.

"It is in our blood, Raina. We were cursed…to be sinners. Or blessed to be sinners…"

Her mother's half-mad sobbing laugh pinged around Raina's head until she wanted to clamp her hands over her ears.

She wrenched her arm free of Gregory's grip. "Let me go ."

Surprise flared in his eyes. " Raina ?"

And as she bolted for her bedroom, leaving Gregory behind, she discovered too late—

If she'd been allowed to choose between a world where monsters and ghosts freely roamed or where her parents weren't hopelessly, and desperately in love with only each other, she'd far prefer the former.